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Queer physiognomies; or, how many ways can we do the history of sexuality?
Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Dana Seitler
I am not claiming that recent arguments have somehow failed to recognize the shifting, partial, and multiple realities and representations of queer subjects and bodies marked deviant at the fin de siecle. Indeed, my own project would not exist if not for the arguments that have asserted the importance of thinking about these multiple, queer realities. I am arguing, rather, that there has been a subtle but no less deleterious aftereffect of sexuality studies: a congealing of "knowledge" about sexual history, an aura of certainty about the fin de siecle rise of the homosexual. This not only diminishes the continuing practice of queer theory by placing it within an overdetermined historical frame but it also serves to reiterate the homo-hereto binary rather than challenge it as a dominating episteme. In turn, it works to reify the "homosexual body" as a distinct object of knowledge. Even Halperin, whose aim is to dislodge Foucault's aphorisms by tracking earlier forms of male-male sexual expression, ends up affirming the ossification of homosexuality at the fin de siecle by declining to transgress beyond the historical borders that Foucauh has set. But my point is less that individual arguments are shutting down the multiple realities of queer practices and histories than that there is an aura which surrounds this work in the academy--an aura of certainty whereby histories of sexuality seem to have become banal. As a result, even in the most nuanced and careful of arguments there is a tendency to refer casually to certain knowledge norms about "the history of sexuality"--to the accepted academic episteme of "the invention of the homosexual body"--as if a politics and theory of sexuality only required us to date the coinage of a new lexical term. Even while we should accept as "axiomatic" that by the early twentieth century homosexuality emerged as a different, visually saturated category of identification laden with a new set of power relations, I am still wondering if there may be more stories to tell about how these identities were represented and understood, or ways in which they failed to perform coherently. Toward this end, I suggest we focus more acutely on the medical discourses that came to name homosexuality in such an ostensibly complete and totalizing way in order to put some pressure on their gaps and blind spots, and in order to gain a fuller purchase on the contestatory, intersecting, or divergent embodiments of sexual modernity. (36)
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In fact, I want to return to what we have learned from Halperin, Foucault, and queer theory, namely, that, as Sedgwick summarizes, issues of modern homo/heterosexual definition are structured by "the relations enabled by the unrationalized coexistence of different models during the different times they do coexist." (37) But how can we understand medico-biological practices and their participation in the regulation and proliferation of sexual discourse without limiting sexual possibility? How do we begin to examine the construction of perverse bodies at the time of their emergence without confining them to our own a priori assumptions about those bodies?
